INDUSTRY
Electronics
HEADQUARTERS
Dublin, Ireland
FAVORITE FEATURES
- Workflow Automator
- Orchestration Center
- Incident Management
- Knowledge Base
- Service Catalog
- Asset Management
- Freshservice Analytics
- SLA Management
PRODUCTS USED
- Freshservice
About Glen Dimplex
Glen Dimplex is a privately owned, international group headquartered in Ireland which operates across four main product areas: Heating & Ventilation, Consumer Appliances, Flame and Precision Cooling. Glen Dimplex is one of the world's leading manufacturers of electric heating appliances and is a global leader in the development and delivery of low carbon solutions for space and water heating, cooling, and ventilation. Their purpose is to be a leader in the transition to a more sustainable world. Which is underpinned by their ‘Empower Now’ Sustainability strategy.
We spoke to Aaron McIvor, Group Service Delivery Manager at Glen Dimplex, to understand more about their business and how IT is pivotal in driving business results.
Business process transformation to streamline multi-country operations.
Considering Glen Dimplex’s global presence, the management team wanted to enable employees to collaborate and work better, irrespective of location. This led to a business transformation program that looked at unifying the technology infrastructure across the group.
With multiple business entities and disparate IT teams spread across geographies, the Glen Dimplex group had several ITSM tools used by each regional business unit, resulting in a siloed and fragmented employee experience marred with complexity.
Glen Dimplex needed a tool to help them unify the service management practice across multiple countries while supporting automation and configuring workflows across business processes around its ERP platform. After evaluating several ITSM Solutions, Glen Dimplex chose Freshservice to drive its business process re-engineering and service management transformation.
“We chose Freshservice because of its product capabilities, scalability, flexibility, clean UI, and simplicity. The workflow tool was very easy to configure and offered endless possibilities. We could easily feed in the details and build the desired workflows on the fly. By choosing Freshservice, we could make changes very quickly, all by ourselves, without going to a support team or somewhere else to get a change request.”
Unifying service requests and delivery across global businesses and divisions
Glen Dimplex was transitioning towards a global working model by setting up systems and processes that were working the same irrespective of where the employees were accessing them from. To establish a consistent experience, the IT team wanted to use the same user interface across business functions. In addition, they wanted to set up a unified platform for all functions and regions that would facilitate internal movements while maintaining business continuity.
Given the scale of transformation, The IT team picked a very small part of the business to pilot this, iterate, and get it right. Once the pilot was completed, Freshservice was extended to other businesses and divisions as and when the ERP solution rolled out.
The IT team also decided they didn't want to move anything ‘legacy’ to the new platform. Aaron says that his organization saw this as an opportunity to question and re-engineer conventional processes and approaches, especially when some were set up over a decade ago and seemed irrelevant today. The objective was to build it right, considering all of this was done in the traditional physical format. So the team got to the basics, like deciding divisions, locations, and categories, how a user would log a ticket, transforming that experience, and scaling it across the organization. Glen Dimplex also moved all paper-based requests to Freshservice.
Driving Freshservice adoption across global business teams
With Freshservice up and running in just a matter of months, Aaron built a cohesive support model within the organization. The renewed approach to centralizing service management meant that employees could not get issues resolved by reaching out to somebody who was co-located. The IT team devised a set of initiatives to make the transition easier for employees, “We did lots of road shows, introduced hands-on training, breakfast mornings, lunch and learn sessions, in addition to having competitions, and everything that we could do to get people acquainted with the tool,” says Aaron.
Having a centralized approach had a lot of benefits. With the same tool being used across global offices, rolling out updates or changes in the platform was easy for the IT team. Service requests could not be submitted without filling in all the requisite information. As for employees, they had to submit all the requisite information right at the point of raising the request, eliminating the possibility of back and forths. Plus, employees could track their requests and potential SLAs and plan accordingly.
Transforming the experience of a global workforce
Aaron points out 6 key facets crucial to their IT service management transformation:
Workflow Automator: Glen Dimplex effectively leveraged automation to minimize and sometimes eliminate human intervention across processes such as onboarding and offboarding employees. Previously, such processes warranted manual hassle between multiple teams, complicating things for the employee and other stakeholders. But today, with the Workflow Automator, the entire onboarding & offboarding process is fully automated, with triggers set up at each stage.
Orchestration Center: With the orchestration center, Glen Dimplex could manage the Azure Active Directory, the on-prem Active Directory, password resets, and Office 365 tools through Freshservice, and over time Aaron says that they would be adding a lot more applications to the mix. Glen Dimplex orchestrated several applications through Freshservice via our Freshworks Marketplace like Remote access and collaboration with TeamViewer, Automated onboarding, offboarding, and other employee service requests with Azure Active Directory on PowerShell, Driving alignment and governance in addition to change management with Smartsheets.
Incident Management: Glen Dimplex uses Freshservice to centrally record, track and manage the incidents across its global sites. A key benefit of incident management is that the agents have greater visibility. In addition, the ability to grade tickets based on importance trigger alerts and get them to flash on the agent dashboard so that they tend to it immediately has been a game changer.
Knowledge Base and Service catalog: The knowledge base has played a pivotal role in empowering employees to resolve issues independently. For instance, when users try to log tickets by entering a few keywords on the service catalog, the support portal recommends quick fixes based on their search. With clear knowledge articles, a simplified service catalog, and built-in automation, Glen Dimplex can deflect a good percentage of tickets to self-service channels.
Asset Management: One of the key reasons for Aaron to choose Freshservice was the fact that Asset Management was built into the tool natively. Glen Dimplex centrally manages and tracks all its physical assets, such as laptops, desktops, and servers, across its global sites on Freshservice. With the introduction of Asset Management, the organization was also able to standardize its hardware and software by bringing down the number of makes and models and the operating system that powered them.
Freshservice Analytics & SLA Management: With Freshservice Analytics, Glen Dimplex can track performance KPIs such as first contact resolution and ticket resolution time, along with agent productivity metrics, globally and share insights with leadership teams and the divisional executives every month. SLAs and KPIs have played a pivotal role in aligning the global IT team to standard metrics while also facilitating tracking and reporting across sites. Access to such information enables the teams to cross-leverage approaches from across the organization, helping them perform better. The IT team is also better equipped to present how they have consistently improved service delivery standards across the organization.
Freshservice for business teams: With IT transforming the service desk experience for the employees, the team looked to extend these best practices to key business functions. They began rolling out Freshservice for the Global Business Services Teams, including Sales Order Management, Procure to Pay, Accounts Receivable, Record to Report & Master Data Management, transforming service delivery across these functions.
Delivering a delightful experience for both employees and agents
Rationalizing the IT service management platform across its global offices and sites offered significant benefits to agents and employees. From an employee perspective, they can easily resolve simpler issues on their own via self-service channels.
“During a busy day, there’s nothing more gratifying than getting a resolution with minimal effort and no disruption to the day’s plans. With the new internal service desk, I find it easy to resolve issues through self-service channels, and raising a ticket on the tool is a breeze in case I need more assistance. I can raise tickets in a matter of minutes thanks to the effective categorization and contextual forms”
From an agent standpoint, having all the information they need to assess and resolve the issue has been a game changer. This has eliminated the potential back-and-forth, improving agent productivity and accelerating the resolution time.
“Freshservice has really made it easy for me to resolve tickets coming my way. One of the key changes I see is that the simpler requests, such as password resets, are mostly resolved through self-service channels. Also, we have set up the forms so precisely that the employees don't feel bogged down by the volume of details they fill in, and at the same time, we have all the information we need to resolve the issue. This has helped me plan and streamline my day better. We, as agents, have collectively been able to consistently push the bar of service delivery standards within the organization”
Looking ahead
The employee experience transformation has set the foundation for Glen Dimplex to have a unified experience for its employees across its global sites. They are looking forward to some pipeline projects, the first being the Scheduler. With the Scheduler, the teams can automate report generation by having them triggered periodically at the right time for a site, doing away with the need for someone to approve and generate them. The team also looks to re-categorize, redesign and streamline the portal further to make it easier and more convenient for employees and agents. Glen Dimplex is also exploring Freddy AI and looks forward to rolling it out over the year.
“We are very happy with where we are at the moment. The service management transformation across our global offices has helped streamline and rationalize the entire employee experience. Today, our agents can address and resolve them quickly, no matter where the employee is located or what language they are raising a ticket in.”
